EXAG Is This Weekend!

Hello everyone! I’ve been so busy having fun with PROCJAM this week that I hardly had time to let you know that all the talks from last Saturday are online for you to watch. We had a great day launching the jam, and people are making incredible, varied, beautiful things for their jam entries. Check them out on Twitter!

If last weekend’s talks weren’t enough games-related brain thinks for you, though, this coming weekend is the second Experimental AI In Games workshop – a followup to both AIGA and EXAG of years past at the annual AIIDE conference. This year it’s a two-day workshop, packed full of cool papers and fun stuff. I thought I’d give you a brief rundown of what’s happening when, and how you can tune in online.

Saturday is our main day for papers. We’ll be streaming our paper talks like any other conference, with questions via YouTube chat and Twitter. You can view the list of accepted papers to be presented here, and soon we’ll have PDF copies of the papers online too, hopefully. I’ll put a link to the YouTube stream here, on Twitter and on the EXAG webpage when it’s ready. Like the PROCJAM talks, you can also tune in later and watch back like a regular video.

In the evening on Saturday and Sunday we’ll be playing games and possibly jamming them too. My current plan is to do a mix of the two – some game playing, some game making – and attempt to stream some of these things. I can quite easily stream my own development, but I might also attempt to stream what other people are doing using something like Periscope – I’ve not used it before, so I’ll look into how feasible it is and update you later.

On the second day, we’ll be having discussion groups, tutorials and some demonstrations I believe. I’ll be playing this by ear – I’ll have a stream setup, but some sessions might run concurrently, and others (like discussion groups) might be hard to run via a stream or be uninteresting for observers. Stay tuned and we’ll keep you updated.

I’m hoping it’s going to be a really productive and fun weekend. Tune in if you can and let us know what you’re doing for #procjam if you’re entering! Some of us will be hacking our PROCJAM projects during the evening sessions too.